Design and Layout
Bootstrap Front-end Support
Support for the leading and widely used Bootstrap framework allows for faster and easier development of responsive sites and Elcom themes.
Themes Engine
A theme is a collection of Masterpages, JavaScript and CSS files, images and module/site configuration packaged into a single distributable ZIP file. Bring together all the components of a theme into single place making working with a website’s layout and design more efficient. This also allows a website’s theme to be downloaded as a ZIP file, and a new theme to be easily installed from a ZIP file as well.
Carousels
Carousels provide non-technical publishers with the ability to create and apply image sliders, rotating banners or carousels on to any page. Simply drag and drop images into the creator, apply heading, text and transition style you like - it's as easy as that.
Code Blocks
Code Blocks provide the ability to write and use custom front-end scripting code i.e. C# or VB and embed these Code Blocks into articles. This gives developers the flexibility and power to create dynamically generated structured content, such as custom menus and lists.
Stylesheet Library
The Stylesheet Library allows you to control, add and edit, the CSS files used on the site.
Templates
Templates are a way of applying content and other article elements to an article when it is first created. Templates are linked to a specific master page that controls its layout.
Corporate Compliance
Allows compliance with corporate standards by locking down the fonts, styles, and components of the editing toolbar.
Menu Creator
Menu Creator allows you to easily add a menu to your site without having to worry about coding
the HTML and JavaScript that would normally be required. It allows you to control styling via CSS
and create different menus for different sections.
JavaScript Library
The Custom CSS Library allows you to control, add and edit, the CSS files used on the site.
Folder Explorer
Drop a feature rich folder tree element into your articles, allowing users to navigate through and manage your website’s folder structure within your front-end pages. You can manage the folder structure as well as uploading new documents and images into a selected folder. The folder explorer element will also load a document list element on the same page to display the contents of a selected folder in that document list.
Premium Content
Premium Content allows you to provide exclusive access to content to site subscribers. Non-members will receive only the title and article description, while logged in subscribers will receive the full length content.
My Work
The My Work feature allows you to keep track of content you’re working on by providing
summarised views of your work in draft, awaiting approval, awaiting review and tasks you’ve either
created or been assigned to.
WYSIWYG Editor
Create articles and pages with the built-in content editor. The intuitive Microsoft-Word like environment provides non-technical users with the ability to author content, create tables, apply styles, create hyperlinks, import multi-media assets and more.
Compare Versions
Compare Version provides users with the ability to simply select two versions and compare amendments with changes highlighted.
User-Friendly URLs
A friendly URL is a web address that is easy to read and includes words that describe the content of the webpage. This type of URL can be "friendly" in 2 ways by helping visitors remember the Web address, and to describe the page to search engines. Elcom has a setting to generate user friendly URLs using the full folder hierarchy.
In-line editing
In-line editing provides users with the ability to very quickly create and update content on the fly. Simple click and edit, providing true WYSIWYG editing (what you see is what you get).
Most Popular Content
Most Popular Content ranks content popularity based on the number of views, article comments, usefulness and star page ratings – surfacing the best content for your user and highlighting content to improve on.
Redirect Management
The Redirect Link section allows users to add previously used URLs to the article to add multiple
ways of getting to the one article. This could be used if moving from an old site to a new site, where
search engines have indexed the previous site and you would like to keep those indexes.
Auto Archive
Auto archive can be used to schedule automatic archival of articles and documents at the folder level
by having content that meets certain criteria be moved to a different folder on a regular basis – e.g.
moving all articles that are older than 30 days to an “Archive” folder once a day.
Defined Content
Defined content allows publishers to add static content that adhere to complex visual layouts that
can even include interactive elements without any knowledge of HTML – e.g. A developer can create
an accordion defined content template enabling publishers to add accordion items to a page with just
a few clicks.
Page Connectors
Forms
It is designed for the everyday user and gives you the ability to create forms quickly and easily to capture data. Form Creator uses a point and click form creator tool with no need for technical input. Simply drag and drop fields into your form. The Form Creator makes creating Feedback, Inquiry, and Quote request forms quick and easy.
Acknowledgements
Display a message when a user visits your site and request their consent or acknowledgement to your message. This flexible feature can be used to request consent from a website visitor to use cookie tracking, as well as on your intranet or portal to request acknowledgement of new policies and procedures.
Ratings
Users can vote on how helpful or unhelpful articles within a site are. This will help you surface the most relevant and helpful content to your users.
RSS Reader and Publisher
Easily display external RSS feeds on your site. Publish fully configurable feeds of content to anyone with an RSS reader. Allow users to subscribe via RSS to real time content updates.
FAQ Manager
The FAQ Managers allows for simple maintenance of Frequently Asked Questions with the ability to setup sections, and then within each section specific topics. Add in a dropdown to show/hide of answers, link to specific articles for more information and more. Access to FAQs can be secured via security groups.
Online Dictionary
The Online Dictionary feature allows a user to set up a page listing any number of terms and their explanations on your site. It also allows terms to be linked so you can link similar terms or point one term to another where there may be multiple names explaining the same concept.
Thesaurus
Using the thesaurus with your keyword search can help your users find results based on both their keyword entered as well as synomyms, common mis-spellings and other associated keywords.
Polls
Allows simple polls to be inserted into articles, with the ability to time control the display of these polls. You can also create a series of questions and answers for users of the site to review.
Blogs
Create multiple blogs, each with their own user security privileges. Manage and moderate blogs and comments, optionally restrict access via user groups and control editing of posts.
Simplified Asset Management
Dynamic Widgets
You can create and maintain one widget to aggregated content e.g. articles, documents or events, and use it to display information across several articles simply by inserting a tag within either an article or template. Add content blocks anywhere throughout your site, in templates and articles, with easily configurable feeds of dynamically generated information.
Document Manager
Upload, store, manage and publish your documents with the Document Manager. Associate metadata and specify access based on security groups. Search and filter documents based on keywords and other criteria.
Document Upload
Document Upload is an article element that provides end users with simple front-end document upload capability. This improves end user experience by allowing them to upload without learning the backend and increases overall site flexibility allowing admins to deploy upload functions exactly where they are needed.
Taxonomy Manager
Create Taxonomy and use it to tag all content. Once the content is tagged, Dynamic Widgets and Enterprise Search can be enhanced to filter, refine and browse content based on the tags.
Custom Metadata
With this feature, you can add in additional details that describes other data such as meta description, meta title and alt images.
Image Manager
The Image Manager enables you to upload, edit, search for, and optimise images. You can also use a Dynamic Widget to set up an image gallery on your site enabling you to display specified images on your site.
Secure and Accountable
User & Group Security
The Security section provides Administrators with the tools to manage users, groups of users and their access to site folders and functionality.
Performance Optimisations
We have a collection of performance optimisations, both under the bonnet, and features that can be utilised with your website. This includes features such as:
Browser caching
Article level output caching
Embedded article output caching
Lazy loading for elements
Persona Panel
The persona view is a new option added into the Elcom admin toolbar, which allows an author to select a specific device screen size and marketing rule set to see how the current article will look to users matching that criteria.
Two-Factor Authentication
Add an extra layer of security to your site, ensuring only the right person can access their accounts and private information. QR codes for use with an authentication app which will generate single use, time sensitive secret codes for input when logging in. You also have the ability to define a 4-digit pin number for logging into your site.
Admin Alerts
Admin Alerts provide regular updates on frequently changed pages to provide control and ensure quality for collaborative authoring environments.
Change Log
This might be the dialog box prompt which can be configured to show on clicking Publish of an Article, which will prompt the user to comment on what changes they have just made to the article.
Collaboration
Team Workspace
Facilitate collaboration by enabling teams to quickly create workspaces, where they can easily participate in conversations and share documents around a topic or project. Workspaces allow teams to move work out of email threads and into centralised collaborative areas which are more efficient, searchable, and can be as open or private as needed. Users with the right permissions can create a Team Workspace for project specific communication and content. You can add a document list, calendar, news stream, RSS feeds or any Elcom module to build a specific collaborative environment.
Workflows
Design and implement comprehensive audit processes for approval of content and forms. Access an unlimited number of workflow ‘baskets’ with complete parallel workflows, and the routing rules engine to adapt and branch workflows differently based on information provided in a form submission and the submitting user. Workflows can skip steps, reassign the approver or terminate early. Approvals for workflow basket steps can also be actioned by replying to the email notifications.
Content Alerts
Each time an article or document is created/updated the author can send out an email notification to specified user groups or mailing lists.
Content Review
You can set content reviews for each article to ensure an article is published only once it has been looked over and approved by a specified individual.
Request Feedback
At any time during or after the article creation process an author can collaborate with other users by requesting feedback or comments.
Content Collaboration
Group author content in a centralised and controlled environment with Elcom. Control access with article check-ins/outs. Manage control interactions with version control and roll-backs.
Notifications Framework
The notifications framework provides a consolidated view of notifications that a logged in user must
action via a visual activity feed. This can be implemented using a notification content tag and a
notification list element.
Enterprise Search
Search
Add search boxes to your site. This is achieved by setting up a Search element in an article. This can then be included in a master page via the embed article control.
Real-Time Search
Real-time search is an easy way to enhance the user experience and productivity of your website, intranet or portal. When a user starts typing in the search field, results are automatically returned as they type. As the user continues to type, the results update in real-time. A ‘more results’ link offers the user the ability to view all search results on a page.
Federated Search
With Federated search, you can make your search results more helpful for users. This feature allows you to incorporate external websites, RSS feeds and file servers into your search results.
Best Bets
The Best Bets function is used for Search and is part of the Enterprise Search module. You can take the most searched for terms and attach articles, documents or events to them. The assets will then appear at the top of the search results, and can be highlighted if needed with styling to suggest assets to the user. This creates suggested results. Search relevancy is calculated in a number of ways but the highest relevancy ranking is given to any items that have been set up using the Best Bets function.
Easy Administration
Responsive Administration
Our administration interface is completely responsive. This allows all the admin screens to adapt and display optimally for any screen size. Leveraging the de-facto standard Twitter Bootstrap responsive framework, our admin screens have also adopted a flatter design. This means that our admin screens now work on the device that you work on.
Accessibility Compliance
We are committed to supporting and maximising accessibility for all web users. A majority of the HTML produced by Elcom core components are WCAG 2.1 AA compliant. While sites still need to be built with WCAG compliance in mind if required, Elcom provides a good starting point.
Local Administration
Give a power user local administration access to a subset of the site allowing them to create and manage users and groups within their section.
Advanced Analytics and Reporting
Google Analytics Integration
Google Analytics integration comes standard with Elcom. Consolidate your Google Adwords, Webmaster and Analytics data for detailed statistics on your website and Google campaigns.
Analytics Panel
The Elcom admin dashboard’s Google Analytics panel can pull real-time data from your site’s Google Analytics account and display rich graphs right in the admin dashboard; displaying visits, popular browsers and top locations statistics over a day, week or month period.
Publishing Reports
A range of reporting tools are available, dependent on which modules have been activated as part of the deployment. Reports can be based on mailing list subscribers, content created, event registrations, KPI’s met plus much more. Then save time by automating the process of generating and distributing reports; create scheduled reports automatically sent to other users as email attachments. Custom, purpose built reports (complete with filters) can also be created by us to cater for your specific business requirements, accessible through the standard reporting dashboard.
Security and User Reports
Elcom’s powerful reporting provides a granular view of your site’s users and their security permissions and access levels. Featuring all the flexibility of the publishing reports, these reports enable you to track site and user activity from the Elcom capabilities a user has access to, folders a user has permission for and their access level.
Data Insights
Data Insights, turns your data into real-time, dynamic and highly configurable dashboards. Data Insights provides nine page elements that enables the creation of visual dashboards displaying site usage data from logged in users. The Data Insights page elements are highly configurable and can be used to gain insights on the usage of your Elcom site.